5 Tips for Improving SEO in 2024
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of making your website busier and is the most effective method of attracting new customers/clients to your site. It increases your visibility in relevant searches, helps generate more site traffic, and generally allows businesses to attract the kind of online attention that they desire!
Of course, over the years, technology has progressed an incredible amount and in the SEO world, a lot has changed. However, the basic fundamental elements tend to stay the same.
This article will help you understand the best practices for improving your SEO this year!
1. Keywords
Keywords are essential for improving SEO - They are specific words or phrases through which people can type into a search engine and (hopefully) find your site. You should try and use your keywords as much as you can, including them in your title, your URL, your metadata descriptions, as anchor text etc. It’s important to feature your keyword/s (or variations thereof) in different places throughout your content as the search machine’s crawlers use algorithms to detect which words are important to a webpage; If a word is in a title, and repeated in the body often, the search engine will know to rank for those keywords. But remember, in terms of SEO, quality is definitely better than quantity. As important as it is to include your keywords, you want to ensure it is readable and not packed with the same word/phrase in every sentence. Think beyond the content of your site, but rather ‘what do I want people to search in order to get here’ - Remembering that people will often search for the symptom to find the cure, so you need to think about what your userbase will be thinking about in order to get to you.
2. Fresh Content
Of course, your content is one of the most essential parts of your site. Your content is what you want your visitors to read/interact with. It’s smart to switch up the content every so often so your readers/clients/customers don’t get a bit bored of the same old thing. Also, remember to keep your target audience in mind and write identifiable and relatable content. Keep it fresh, use different layouts, bring some great images, gifs and videos into your work (And dare I say it, even a cheeky Emoji or two depending on your audience). You need to keep creating engaging content. Remember to also properly optimize any images you use. Your content is the base of your site, and the more appealing the content, the more people notice, share and visit. The length of content is also important, a few hundred words may not rank as highly on search engines - subsequently, you don’t want to over face users with a novel of content.
3. Page Speed
The speed at which your page loads is super important. People who are waiting 2/3+ minutes for a single page to load will often get bored or distracted and leave before it has a chance to finish (even more than a few seconds!). You really want it in single figure seconds. There are lots of ways to improve your speed, including properly sizing images, avoiding large layout scripts, and many more. You can check how fast your site loads with GTmetrix (where you can also track your performance, get notified when your page is slow,) and get Page Speed Insights with loads of information on how to improve your page speed. Slow sites pay twice, as slow loaders often get hit by the search engine crawlers and end up falling down their rankings.
4. Relevant & Unique Metadata
The metadata description is an element easily forgotten about, but it turns out it is quite vital. This is the top section of Google that appears with a link to your page and the smaller description underneath. This is what people will essentially see first before any content or your actual site. It’s like a mini window display to your site. Decent metadata is typically at least two sentences uniquely detailing your site/page. Your meta tags, which only appear in your code and not as text on the site itself, are essentially snippets of descriptive indicators that help the search engine know what your page is about. It’s important to be clear, concise and detailed without keyword-stuffing. Putting too many repetitive keywords/phrases but this can lead to negative user experience and search engines can now filter through pages to check for recurring, useless words.
5. Links!
Links are what navigate users in and out of your site and can really help your page. When creating links on your page (internal links), it’s important to remember that simply creating a link by having text saying “Click Here” doesn’t help SEO. People don’t type “click here” into google. You want your links to preferably include your keyword/phrase so it’s more likely your page will appear on a search engine when they include your more specific words, hopefully driving more traffic to your site. External links can be really helpful too by helping a search engine cross-reference results containing your data and links.
Of course, while we have only scratched the surface with these five tips, there are plenty more elements we haven’t covered in this article, such as learning from analytics tools, making your site mobile-friendly, optimizing for voice search, video marketing strategies, a call to action for site visitors, and many more. It’s always a good idea to have a research and read around to find as many tips for improving your SEO as you can - preparation is key! The tips we’ve covered in this article are just a few of many ways to improve your SEO in 2021 but hopefully you’ve got more of an idea of things to watch out for when bringing your site to life.